JACK & AMANDA PALMER’S
YOU GOT ME SINGING OUT NOW
TOUR KICKS OFF JULY 16
Amanda Palmer and (her father) Jack Palmer’s new album You Got Me Singing, a lovingly put together album, is out now via AmandaPalmer.net and iTunes. Amanda sings and plays piano and ukulele, and Jack, a semi-professional choral singer, plays guitar and lends his rich bass voice to a variety of cover songs that span decades.
“The main inspiration behind this record was to share songs and time with my dad,” says Amanda, who was separated from her father when she was less than a year old. “It was a really good reason to spend healing time together, sharing our musical histories, all poetically punctuated by the fact that I was seven months pregnant when we recorded. I knew that from my post at the mixing desk and the mic, this music was being heard in the womb, and so the song selection was really important…we didn’t want this album to sound corny, we wanted it to sound like the connective tissue between three generations. The songs had to be simple.”
Jack Palmer, who is 72 and sings choral music regularly for the National Cathedral in Washington DC, says “I believe nothing is more powerful than love, and that nothing expresses it better than singing. It was one of Amanda’s songs that began healing our fractured relationship. Years later, I hope the love that went into this project will perhaps touch listeners in the same way.”
Jack and Amanda Palmer have confirmed tour dates in support of You Got Me Singing. They’ll play selections from the album, and it is rumoured that they may bring other family members onto stage. The complete tour dates are below.
As Maria Popova (www.brainpickings.org) writes in the album sleeve notes: “An album of cover songs, like culture itself, is an hourglass – the same material passes through the narrow opening of the present, back and forth, over and over again. Jack tweaked and retrofitted the lyrics to Phil Ochs’s piercing protest song “In the Heat of the Summer” adding, “Another black kid facedown in the road / whose life did not seem to matter” and suddenly the half-century between the Harlem riots of 1964 and the Black Lives Matter movement crumbles into a single grain of sand. Sinéad O’Connor wrote “Black Boys On Mopeds” in 1983, after a young black man named Colin Roach was shot dead by British police and his killers were acquitted. As the song is beckoned back to life in the wake of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner’s deaths, we are chilled out of our self-congratulatory illusion of progress – however far we may have come, we have a long way to go.”
“There is a Victorian nursery rhyme, “Wynken, Blynken and Nod,” a phantasmagorical children’s poem by Eugene Field which was originally set to music by another family duo, Lucy and Carly Simon. There is a country death song (“Louise”), a traditional Scottish lullaby (“Skye Boat Song”) about a journey to Amanda’s immigrant Grandmother’s Island of Origin, a modern-day gay rights anthem (“Glacier”), and an ode to simple and humble human connection (“I Love You So Much”) written by a hometown friend of Amanda’s. The songs are strung together by a connective thread woven of the old ideals of folk music – ideals about equality and love and human dignity, all the more urgent today if there is any hope to be had for our civil society and our inner lives.”
The album was engineered by Joe Costa at Middletree studio in Nashville, TN, and recorded at Dreamland Studio in rural upstate New York.
Please watch the beautiful stop animation David Mack (Kabuki) produced video for “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” here: http://po.st/APvblYT.
YOU GOT ME SINGING
TRACKLISTING:
1. You Got Me Singing (Leonard Cohen)
2. Wynken, Blynken and Nod (Lucy & Carly Simon)
3. Again (Melanie)
4. 1952 Vincent Black Lightning (Richard Thompson)
5. Louise Was Not Half Bad (Tom T Hall)
6. Black Boys on Mopeds (Sinead O’Connor)
7. All I Could Do (Kimya Dawson)
8. In The Heat of the Summer (Phil Ochs)
9. Pink Emerson Radio (Kathleen Edwards)
10. Skye Boat Song (traditional)
11. Glacier (John Grant)
12. I Love You So Much (Noah Britton)
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TOUR DATES BELOW:
July
16 – Washington, DC – 9:30 Club
18 – Lexington, MA – First Parish Church
19-20 – New York, NY – Le Poisson Rouge
23 – Hudson, NY – Basilica Hudson
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